openSUSE Leap 15.3 Released for Public Beta Testing, Download Now

openSUSE Leap 15.3 Beta

After several delays, the beta version of the upcoming openSUSE Leap 15.3 operating system is now available for public testing to allow the Linux community to get an early taste of the new features and improvements.

openSUSE Leap is openSUSE’s regular release that follows the development cycle of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system. As such, openSUSE Leap 15.3 beta comes with packages from the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 Service Pack 3 (SP3) release, including the Linux 5.3 kernel.

This kernel version is maintained by SUSE and introduces support for AMD Navi GPUs, new IPv4 addresses, RISC-V improvements, and compatibility with the Intel SST (Speed Select Technology) used in Intel Xeon servers.

With the openSUSE Leap 15.3 release, openSUSE and SUSE worked on bringing openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise closer together than ever by unifying feature sets, as well as building the openSUSE Leap operating system on top of binary packages from SUSE Linux Enterprise.

“We expect full binary identicality in openSUSE Leap 15.3 Beta and Public Beta of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3,” said the developers.

openSUSE Leap 15.3 also promises a seamless migration experience for those who want to migrate from openSUSE Leap to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), sound enablement for Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 400 support, support for the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment, and much more.

Among other noteworthy changes, openSUSE Leap 15.3 removes the KDE 4 and Qt4 technologies as they are no longer maintained and replaced by the newer KDE Plasma 5 and Qt 5 series respectively. However, due to compatibility reasons, some Qt 4 packages may still be available in the distribution.

You can download the openSUSE Leap 15.3 beta release right now from the official website as installable ISO images for 64-bit (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM 64-bit), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), as well as IBM system Z and LinuxONE (s390x) architectures.

JeOS (Just Enough OS) images for use in KVM, XEN HVM, OpenStack, VMware, and Hyper-V virtual machines are available for download as well. Unfortunately, live images aren’t available at the moment of writing.

When testing openSUSE Leap 15.3 beta, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version of the operating system, so don’t install it and use it on a production machine. The final release should see the light of day on June 2nd, 2021, and a Release Candidate (RC) build should be available for testing in late April.

If you’re willing to test drive the openSUSE Leap 15.3 beta release and report bugs, you could receive a T-shirt. More details are available in the release announcement page.

Last updated 3 years ago

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